Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub opens up about his roles being reduced regularly

Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub said that he is often promised the world when he signs on to projects, but people very quickly go back on their word. He said that many times, he was assured that he’d get an individual poster for himself, but that hasn’t happened. He also revealed that on several occasions, his roles have been reduced because it was felt that he was overpowering his more popular co-stars.

In an interview with Siddharth Kannan, Zeeshan said that he always feels bad when this happens, to this day. He said that he can look at this situation from a distance, like a job, but more than himself, he feels that the characters that he has created have been betrayed. Zeeshan revealed that he is currently negotiating with the producers of an upcoming project to give him a ‘special appearance’ credit because they’ve completely butchered his role. “You’ll know it when you see it. You’ll wonder how I could have agreed to this project,” he said.

Zeeshan was told what actor Arshad Warsi recently said about insecure stars getting his lines edited because they felt he was going to steal the scene and the actor admitted that this had happened to him as well: “This has happened to me. It has happened often and it has happened majorly,” he said in Hindi, adding, “It’s in the past, but I’ve had to deal with it. So often, in rehearsals, they can tell if I’m running away with the scene and when you see the script the next day, the entire character graph has been changed.”

He continued, “Sometimes, you get this shock after the edit when you’re watching the film at a screening. You realise that scenes have been cut, the camera is no longer on you and the movie cuts to the next scene where you had a good line. This has happened a lot and on some level, I’ve gotten used to it. But yes, it feels equally bad each time.”